...Celebrating Your Father’s 33rd Deathiversary
Posted by Steven Wingate at 1/12/2008 8:37 PM and is filed under Anniversaries,Self-Fulfilling Prophecy,mourning,death,Fathers,grief 
“Cut me some slack,” I wanted to tell my wife as she chastised me for waking up at 4:00 a.m. and angrily eating half a box of cereal. “My father died again today.”
But she never came downstairs to give me a hard time, so I had to yell at myself instead. It’s this way every year, even thirty-three years after the act, though there’s no earthly reason why. It ruins Christmas, ruins New Year’s Eve and Day. Ruins my vacation from teaching. The whole holiday season is basically a run-up to January 10, when I wake up feeling like crap and re-live the creation of the gaping, stupefying hole in my life created by my dad’s death when I was ten.
I should be over it by now, right? I’ve lived three times longer without a father than I ever did with one, so it shouldn’t be such a big deal. But once the hole is there, it’s always there; it will always seek ways to remind you of itself, and you will always seek ways to remind yourself of it.
So I guess that’s what’s different about the 33rd deathiversary as opposed to the 32nd, and other previous ones. Every year I get grumpy starting about January 7—my father’s death took awhile, as he had a stroke and lay in a coma for about three days while his family waited for him to miraculously recover or die—and don’t really notice until the 9th or so, when I realize that “Oh yeah, tomorrow’s the day.” Then I’ll get sullen and quiet and extra-grouchy, sitting around and thinking a lot. Wondering why the feeling still hits me [italics important] this time of year.
But deathiversary #33 is different. It’s shaping up to be the one that helps me recognize and embrace my own agency in letting this feeling return, even encouraging it on a subconscious, lizard-brain level. Because it’s not as if that feeling of missing my father exists in the external world like some kind of asteroid that periodically rotates around the sun of my consciousness and hits me [italics important]; clearly that feeling exists in my synapses, in the linguistic and habitual constructs that make up my psyche. I have to own the fact that I invite the feeling into my heart every year and embrace it, despite the fact that it makes me feel like crap for a few weeks.
And apparently doesn’t do much good for the people around me, either.
So the question becomes: why am I clinging to this misery and what is it supposed to be going for me? Is it simply habit? Have I been mourning for so long that I don’t know anything else to do this time of year? Mere self-pity? A routine that I’ve gone through so many times that the pain and sadness actually bring me comfort?
Hard to say. It may all be working itself out right now in the novel I’m working on, which I won’t say the name of because I might jinx it (and because I might change it). But I suspect that I don’t really want to know my reasonings for this ritual remembering, this ritual misery, because I don’t want to get too greedy about trying to solve the mystery of myself. I like a little mystery in myself the way I used to like mystery in lovers, and not like some mystery in my family.
But even as I write this down, it feels pathological—an excuse to keep clinging to the particular misery which defines me because I know that if I stopped clinging to the misery I would either (a) have nothing to define me, or (b) have to find completely new things to define me that would require an absolute change in my being.
And who really wants to go through that?
Sometimes I think that January 10 is my opportunity to molt, to go through that absolute change. And yet I cling to the old self, the sad, perpetually mourning self, despite whatever opportunity I have. Maybe January 10 really is an asteroid that comes around every year, and I’m just too scared to jump onto it.
Round and round I go. Spinning in circles. Making new knots as I finally develop a strategy to un-knot the old ones.
The mysteries of the cavernous human mind/soul/spirit. Best left unfathomed because the fathomers might get lost. Might enjoy all that digging, poking, and wondering so much that they never come up to see the light of day again. Like spelunkers who willingly lose themselves to the immensity of the earth’s one giant cave.
There. Confession done. For another year, at least.
P.S.— I’ll write about my dad some more, I think. Fill in some of the blanks in this story as it now stands, such as why it really wasn’t such a bad thing that he died. But I’ll only do it when I really have to , when I’ve run out of interesting or quasi-interesting things to write about in the rest of my life. Because in all honesty, writing about my dad is like opening up the oldest, most dried-up latrine in the world, adding a ton of water, and stirring it until the stink is all-pervasive.
But she never came downstairs to give me a hard time, so I had to yell at myself instead. It’s this way every year, even thirty-three years after the act, though there’s no earthly reason why. It ruins Christmas, ruins New Year’s Eve and Day. Ruins my vacation from teaching. The whole holiday season is basically a run-up to January 10, when I wake up feeling like crap and re-live the creation of the gaping, stupefying hole in my life created by my dad’s death when I was ten.
I should be over it by now, right? I’ve lived three times longer without a father than I ever did with one, so it shouldn’t be such a big deal. But once the hole is there, it’s always there; it will always seek ways to remind you of itself, and you will always seek ways to remind yourself of it.
So I guess that’s what’s different about the 33rd deathiversary as opposed to the 32nd, and other previous ones. Every year I get grumpy starting about January 7—my father’s death took awhile, as he had a stroke and lay in a coma for about three days while his family waited for him to miraculously recover or die—and don’t really notice until the 9th or so, when I realize that “Oh yeah, tomorrow’s the day.” Then I’ll get sullen and quiet and extra-grouchy, sitting around and thinking a lot. Wondering why the feeling still hits me [italics important] this time of year.
But deathiversary #33 is different. It’s shaping up to be the one that helps me recognize and embrace my own agency in letting this feeling return, even encouraging it on a subconscious, lizard-brain level. Because it’s not as if that feeling of missing my father exists in the external world like some kind of asteroid that periodically rotates around the sun of my consciousness and hits me [italics important]; clearly that feeling exists in my synapses, in the linguistic and habitual constructs that make up my psyche. I have to own the fact that I invite the feeling into my heart every year and embrace it, despite the fact that it makes me feel like crap for a few weeks.
And apparently doesn’t do much good for the people around me, either.
So the question becomes: why am I clinging to this misery and what is it supposed to be going for me? Is it simply habit? Have I been mourning for so long that I don’t know anything else to do this time of year? Mere self-pity? A routine that I’ve gone through so many times that the pain and sadness actually bring me comfort?
Hard to say. It may all be working itself out right now in the novel I’m working on, which I won’t say the name of because I might jinx it (and because I might change it). But I suspect that I don’t really want to know my reasonings for this ritual remembering, this ritual misery, because I don’t want to get too greedy about trying to solve the mystery of myself. I like a little mystery in myself the way I used to like mystery in lovers, and not like some mystery in my family.
But even as I write this down, it feels pathological—an excuse to keep clinging to the particular misery which defines me because I know that if I stopped clinging to the misery I would either (a) have nothing to define me, or (b) have to find completely new things to define me that would require an absolute change in my being.
And who really wants to go through that?
Sometimes I think that January 10 is my opportunity to molt, to go through that absolute change. And yet I cling to the old self, the sad, perpetually mourning self, despite whatever opportunity I have. Maybe January 10 really is an asteroid that comes around every year, and I’m just too scared to jump onto it.
Round and round I go. Spinning in circles. Making new knots as I finally develop a strategy to un-knot the old ones.
The mysteries of the cavernous human mind/soul/spirit. Best left unfathomed because the fathomers might get lost. Might enjoy all that digging, poking, and wondering so much that they never come up to see the light of day again. Like spelunkers who willingly lose themselves to the immensity of the earth’s one giant cave.
There. Confession done. For another year, at least.
P.S.— I’ll write about my dad some more, I think. Fill in some of the blanks in this story as it now stands, such as why it really wasn’t such a bad thing that he died. But I’ll only do it when I really have to , when I’ve run out of interesting or quasi-interesting things to write about in the rest of my life. Because in all honesty, writing about my dad is like opening up the oldest, most dried-up latrine in the world, adding a ton of water, and stirring it until the stink is all-pervasive.
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